hello, welcome to the health talk, i'm dr.manny. it's no secret that stem cell research is changing the face of medicine. scientistsare getting closer than ever before to curing many devastating diseases. but it's howthey use these powerful cells that remains a controversial subject. joining me now isvice president of international stem cell corporation, dr. simon craw. welcome, doc,to the program. hello.alright, let's talk about stem cells. what is a stem cell and how many type of stem cellsare there? okay. let's talk about human stem cellsfirst. there's basically two types of human stem cells. there's what we call pluripotentstem cells and then what we call adult or
somatic stem cells. adult stem cells comefrom adult tissue. this is what i have in my body right now?yes, so you have... i cut myself, the stem cell goes ahead andregenerates the tissue. exactly, it's in your skin, it's in yourkidneys, it's in your bone. those are adult stem cells and they help your organs repairthemselves. the healing process.the other category of stem cells are called pluripotent stem cells, and the controversyaround pluripotent stem cells comes from the fact that they are derived from embryos, anothername for them is embryonic stem cells. in the creation of those stem cells the embryois destroyed and people believe that life
has already started at that point, and soin destroying the embryo you're killing.... there's an ethical issue with that.exactly. what kind of stem cells are you using?my company, international stem cell, we've discovered a new class of pluripotent stemcells, and they are stem cells that have the same characteristics of embryonic stem cells,but they don't involve destroying a human embryo. the technical name for them is parthenogeneticstem cells. it's a bit of a mouthful but they're essentially the same as embryonicstem cells, but avoiding the ethical controversy. right, and i guess the definition of a pluripotentstem cell means that it could really change into any kind of tissue or adapt itself intoany kind of need. but, you found the same
type of cell now without destroying embryos,right? exactly.beautiful. a pluripotent stem cell can become any cell...any type of cell in the body, it has a lot of use. when you were doing the research,how did you come about these types of cells? the diseases that we're interested in arediabetes, parkinson's disease, diseases of the liver and diseases of the eye thatcause blindness in the back of the eye, the retina and in the front of the eye, the cornea.we're interested in treating these diseases with cells derived from our pluripotent stemcells. right. how is that research going?it's going very well. it's all pre-clinical
at the moment, the research in the sense thatwe are not in human clinical trials. we're in the research phases where we're growingthe tissue, we're trying to understand the properties of the tissue and they have theright characteristics that we could implant them into humans safely.you also then began to develop a cosmetic line, because you found that these stem cellscan be utilized for the healing, i guess, or the rejuvenation of the skin, right?exactly. along the way as part of our therapeutic area research, we made a number of discoveriesthat we could use extracts from our stem cells to treat human skin cells, fibroblasts andkeratinocytes. the extracts from the stem cells can have a beneficial effect on thesecells, and that serendipitous discovery led
us to think about developing a skin care regimen.our creams contain the extracts of stem cells, they don't contain stem cells themselves.we... what is an extract of stem cells?we essentially crack open the stem cells and take all of the proteins and peptides outof the center of the stem cells, and then encapsulate them in a nanosphere that we canformulate into a cream. it contains the goodness from the stem cells, but it doesn't containthe membrane of those stem cells. stem cells are large and you can't apply them topicallyto the skin. okay. you've taken the content of the stemcell as compared to, then the other methodology is actually injecting the fat stem cells intothe skin?
yes, and i think injecting the fat stem cellstries to stimulate the skin and plump the skin up, essentially do the same thing aswhat we do, but we apply the extracts topically and the extracts absorb into the skin, andthen release the proteins and that's what activates the cells.have you done any studies on the efficacy of this cream?we have. we've done clinical studies, and we have very good clinical results in termsof appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, skin brightness, luminosity. skin firmnessfor example, we've got very good clinical results from skin firmness, and then we'vedone a large number of what we call in vitro testing, which is laboratory testing on skincells, and applying our extract to skin cells
and looking at how various proteins are expressedby those skin cells. the important proteins are things like collagen and elastin thateveryone knows about, and we've shown quite clearly that our extract increases the levelof those proteins in the skin cells. alright, where can people get more information?our products are on sale at lifelineskincare.com. thank you so much for joining us. if you haveany health topics you want to talk to me, about email me at fox at drmanny@foxnews.com.until next time, i'm dr. manny.
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